When Gordon speaks at the World Bank on Thursday, March 31 – at 11 a.m. in J B1-080, as part of the Macrofiscal Seminar Series – economy-watchers can look forward to hearing some ideas that challenge the orthodoxies of recent macroeconomic thinking. His topic – “Secular Stagnation on the Supply Side: Slow Growth in U. S. Productivity and Potential Output” – seems likely to spark some new thinking among techno-utopians and techo-dystopians alike.

To watch Gordon’s speech live via Webex – at 11 a.m. on Thursday, March 31 – click here. To dial in to listen to the audio, dial (in the United States and Canada) 1-650-479-3207, using the passcode 735 669 472. For those telephoning from outside the United States and Canada, the appropriate numbers can be found on this page.

“Economic growth is not a steady process that creates economic advance at a regular pace, century after century,” asserts Gordon. After millennia of stagnation – with scarcely any progress in most humans’ health, nutrition, longevity or living conditions – a Big Bang of economic progress occurred with the Industrial Revolution and its follow-on decades of creativity. Transformational technologies – such as urban clean-water systems, electricity and the automobile – changed the human condition in ways that had once been inconceivable.

Yet since that Big Bang, Gordon reckons, there’s been only gradual, grudging improvement in TFP. That vital measurement has grown only very slowly since 1970 – at a rate only about one-third as fast as the pace achieved between 1920 and 1970. And that laggard pace even takes into account the efficiency enhancements unleashed by the digital-age breakthroughs that (in the starry-eyed view of techno-enthusiasts) may have opened up new horizons of prosperity.

There have been few deeply meaningful recent advances, asserts Gordon, in areas that are truly critical to universal economic well-being – and nothing comparable to the earlier leaps forward in such realms as food, clothing, housing and transportation. The era of major technological breakthroughs may be largely over: While humanity may continue to design some modest productivity-boosting innovations, none of them seems likely to be as transformational as the earlier wealth-creating triumphs. Perhaps the “low-hanging fruit” has already been harvested, leaving just slim pickings now.

Gordon’s imaginative thesis, along with Milanovic’s insightful analysis, will challenge the thinking of traditionalists and will rattle the complacency of techno-utopians – making next week’s World Bank lecture and InfoShop book launch all the more provocative.